With the explosion of the Internet and the increase in home networks and business networks, the numbers of available IP addresses are not enough. One solution may be to redesign the address format to allow for more possible addresses. While this may be implemented, it may take many years to implement because it may require modification of the entire infrastructure of the Internet.
Network address translation (NAT) is a method of remapping one Internet Protocol (IP) address space into another by modifying network address information in IP datagram packet headers while they are in transit across a traffic routing device. The method was used for ease of rerouting traffic in IP networks without renumbering every host. It has become a way of conserving global address space allocations in face of address exhaustion.